As well known, the goal of digital image stabilization methods (with an aim of simplification, the methods of digital image stabilization will be called hereafter “DIS”) is to remove unwanted camera movement or jitter, thus providing a more pleasant viewing experience, to produce a sequence that displays requisite camera movement only. Jitter is defined as all the undesired positional fluctuation of the image that is added to the intentional motion of the camera, in particular translation and/or rotation. In most prior art DIS systems, a motion estimation is performed between two successive frames (at times called respectively t and t−1) to get the global motion of the image frame which is represented by a single vector called the “Global Motion Vector” (hereafter “GMV”). Therefore, this motion represents only the translational Motion between the successive frames, and the jitter correction applied consequently only corrects the translational jitter
Such correction is not sufficient. As a matter of facts, jitter is often also of rotational nature, either purely rotational or mixed with a translational jitter component. Indeed, once the translational jitter has been removed, the rotational residual component becomes all the more apparent.
Furthermore, most prior art systems, supporting both rotational and translational correction, are complex and expensive. As an example of such methods, among others, one can quote the following ones: the paper by Mc Reynolds et al.: “Stabilization of infra-red aerial image sequences using robust estimation.”, published in “Proceedings of the Conference Vision Interface 1999”.